Mississippi Mudcats

On 8/25/2024 at 2:47 PM, Stefan_W said:

Oh yeah, for sure. I dont believe CLink does that at all but there is no way of stopping people from asking friends to bid, etc. I am pretty sure some auction houses (not CLink) have no rule against bidding up your own books as well since it is impossible to prevent this sort of thing regardless. Heck, I am sure that some people got friends to bid up their books in live auctions prior to the Internet. It is all a part of the fun of taking part in auctions. 

Honestly, I have zero issues with sellers  enlisting friends to bid for them. If they want to buy back their book and pay 10%, so what? It is still a buyer’s choice how high they bid. 

Rather, my gripe is with auction houses that bid you right up to any bid you leave to squeeze every dollar out of the buyer. Owners cannot do that as they risk buying back the books, but auction houses know what bids are in the system and can and do, unless it is just uncanny how I always place perfect bids every time I place one early because I cannot be on the line for the live auction LOl. I really don’t think I am that smart. 

Auction houses are also buying books in for their own accounts, as some of the biggest recent sales were bought by owners of the auction houses. I am not sure if that one really bothers me, although they do have an unfair advantage vis-a-vis other bidders, 

But I do have a big issue with auction houses buying your book, upgrading it and reselling it, which has happened to me more times than I care to remember. I don’t even know if they press them, maybe it’s a straight resubmission.

There are lots of games that dealers/auction houses play, a seller having someone bid for them is the least of my concerns. 

On 8/1/2024 at 9:09 PM, Sweet Lou 14 said:

Hahaha well we could play this game all day and I'm not sure there are very many issues for which my copy is nicer than yours.  That 9.6 is insane.

Sorry, Lou, I did not mean it as a put down, in fact I never said it was our book. Your collection is great, Lou, I view it often and as I told you last year, I expected you to win the overall award in 2023. It is very extensive and you have done an excellent job of assembling complete sets of books in a consistent high grade. In many ways, I wish we had adopted your approach to collecting. It is true that we have more high grade books, but we also have less consistency and have settled for some restored books, while in your infinite wisdom you have eschewed that option. 

I hope you don’t think my disdain for the way CGC scores sets and the frivolity with which they approach the annual awards is in any way a put down on your achievement. Yes, I do wish CGC would take the awards seriously and judge sets on merit rather than making them participation certificates. There was a time when most winners were knockout sets, today I have no idea what they are trying to do, as there were thousands of better sets based on points, completeness and presentation than many of this year’s winners-and some of those of the past few years for that matter. I don’t know when exactly they changed the awards from being merit based to some basis that is totally undefinable, but I defy anyone to justify what was done by the judges this year.

As I related to you, our issue was over the fact that we were told by CGC that, if we made our sets public, they would be fairly graded irrespective of any past awards. If they had just told us you are maxed out and we are trying to spread things around, we would not have entered. Now we never expected to win another overall award or have any set win that had won before, but we did have a number of sets that have never won anything, which we thought would compete well in a fair competition. 

So we spent a couple of hundred hours updating and improving our registry sets this year only to have over 25 long sets with over 100,000 points, which were complete, fully pictured and described, lose to some very short incomplete sets with 3,000 or so points. But it was not just our sets that got screwed, I did not take the snub personally because in many cases you would be hard pressed to find any less deserving sets than the ones chosen: what the Hell are these awards recognizing? They have honestly become a big joke, even if we are the only ones to say it.  I guess most on here want the awards to be participation certificates, which is fine, let’s just be honest about what they have become. 

Bottom line, they are CGC’s awards, they can be as arbitrary and capricious as they like. I just wish they had been honest with us so we did not waste all our time updating and upgrading our registry for this year’s so-called competition LOL. But again, Lou, despite my disdain for the way registry scoring and the registry awards are done by CGC, in your case the award was very much deserved and in no means was my post above meant as a put down; I just thought you might enjoy the scan. 

On 7/26/2024 at 11:56 AM, Sweet Lou 14 said:

Wow, this really caught me off guard!!

Extremely humbled and grateful for this unexpected honor.  

Congrats Lou, your collection is stunning and the award is very overdue. 

Congrats to Lou! His collection is stunning and I really thought his winning of the overall award was several years overdue. 

However, at the risk of being labeled poor losers, the way the individual set award winners are determined remains a total mystery to us. Let me say upfront that I don’t think anyone collects comics to win these awards, they really are not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But this year the three winners of the best SA set, which we are focusing on only because we are primarily SA collectors, all came from rather obscure titles. Two of the sets were not complete and one of those was ranked third in the title. All three sets had less than 6000 registry points and one should have been in a different category. No offense intended to the collectors who owned those sets, we don’t know any of them, but the criteria CGC employs to select the set award winners every year defies logic, because it is clearly not based on total points, set ranking, completeness or presentation. There were at least 1000 better SA sets based on those criteria than the three that won. 

Maybe we are just ignorant, but it seems to us that these awards have become more participation trophies than anything else, which is fine, just tell us that upfront. Otherwise, how is it that a set that is incomplete, ranks third in its title behind two complete sets, and scores less than 6,000 registry points is judged better than ones that are first in a title, are 100% complete, and contain full descriptions of every book with front and back pictures and hundreds of thousands of registry points?  If nothing else, it certainly draws into question how CGC scores books in the registry. 

Admittedly, these are CGC’s awards and they can do with them anything they like, but at least they should explain the criteria for judging the sets so that we collectors can decide whether to make our sets public for the competition. 

Congrats again to Lou and the other winners, but I think these awards should either be discontinued or winning sets judged based on some objective standard of merit, which is clearly not the case currently. In fact, I think the entire registry point system is in dire need of revision, what exactly are registry points supposed to signify anyway?  Currently, books that have higher populations and are regularly traded are scored much higher than rarer books that may well be more valuable if they ever appeared on the market. 

Sets should also be scored based on some percentage of completion component, which we have argued for years. And then there is the problem that the collection that stands second in the total point standings was sold several years ago, but still tops the registry in several sets-there are several other similar examples. At the very least, CGC should make each competitor confirm that they still own the books in their sets. I know of several occasions in the past where awards have been given to people who have already sold some or all of the books in their award winning sets. 

At any rate, sorry for the rant and I am sure now that some people here will attack this post or us personally and come to bat for the integrity of the registry points and/or judging system, but they are certainly a mystery to us-and we’ve been collecting CGC comics for over two decades and have been on the registry since 2010. 

On 6/15/2024 at 11:31 AM, tth2 said:

I can help fill in some of the chain of ownership on these books.

I bought the WP Showcase 35 & 36 in 2004 directly from Tom Hanlin/Linmoth, who is the guy who slabbed them after having bought them directly from the OO (I think).  They were originally 9.6 OW-W and 9.6 OW, respectively, in old label slabs.

I sold them in the same slabs in May 2007 on Heritage.  It turns out I knew the collector who ended up buying them, so when a big SA collector told me he was looking for them, I was able to help broker a deal in 2009 (still in the same slabs).  The funny thing is that this collector was the same collector who had sold me a big run of Western Penn Flash back in early 2003 (yes, it can be a very incestuous hobby at times).

I unfortunately fell out of touch with this collector, but apparently at some point he sold them to a couple of other collectors who starting from 2009 began sweeping up just about every ultra-HG mega-key SA DC they could get their hands on.  For all I know, the collector I brokered the deal with was himself brokering a deal for these other collectors!  Then 4 or 5 years ago those collectors started shopping their collection around.  Whether they were the sellers to you, or there was one or more intermediate purchasers in between, I don't know.  And clearly the books were reslabbed and regraded at some point after 2009. 

Thanks, that makes some sense. The guy who I got the books from, who likes to stay anonymous, had an incredible collection of SA DCs-undoubtedly the ultra HG collector you referenced. He sold most of them off over the last 5-6 years. I bought some books directly from him and some at auction, but I by no means got them all. He stills collects and buys and sells comics, but his focus has changed. His books were never registered, but he was like the Brulato of DCs. 

I am not a good judge of grading, but I do have a lot of 9.6s that look worse than the Showcase #34. Unfortunately, grading is so subjective that it is one of the most frustrating things about this hobby. I know I have upgraded dozens of books where I have sold my under-copy, only to see that book reappear in the market at a higher grade, sometimes higher than the book that replaced it in our collection. I really wish that CGC would only grade a book once. 

Thanks for the info and take care… 

On 9/26/2023 at 10:21 AM, tth2 said:

That's funny because it was owned by another Tom (not Brulato) for a long time.

Interesting, I never knew Brulato ever slummed enough to buy any DCs. I would love to see his books registered, what would he have 30-40 million registry points?  It would just be fun to see all the pics. 

On 9/26/2023 at 9:17 AM, Chiparus said:

$30k at best???

I think it’s probably worth  more than that, maybe $40-45k. Hell, who knows, with the price fluctuations we have seen since COVID, I’m  reluctant to value any book. 

On 9/26/2023 at 10:15 AM, tth2 said:

That is indeed a fantastic set!

Upgraded from its previous 9.4 slab.  I shouldn't be shocked, but I still am because it wasn't a 9.6, in my opinion, even with a press.  I had a chance to buy the WP copy but determined it was not as good as the Slobodian copy, although it was a tough decision because I ended up buying the WP Showcase 35 & 36 from the same seller and hated breaking up the WP set.  

Interesting, not sure that I agree, but in my case the WP was already a 9.6 when I got it. Sounds like you have owned some great books. I assume you owned the WP #35 and  #36 over a decade ago? 

You don’t happen to have a high-grade Showcase #39?

On 1/13/2024 at 9:33 AM, DanCooper said:

As impressive as the final number for this Showcase 4 CGC 9.6 was, rumblings over in the Heritage thread in the Golden Age forum, alluding to it may have been sold privately over the past year for $1.5 million!

If so, that would amount to a MASSIVE $750,000 LOSS! Considering Heritage gets 20% from the buyer side ($150,000 minus from the $900K) AND the seller didn't get hit with a commission from Heritage also.

It did. I have never owned the book, I have a 9.2, which I have owned for over a decade. I still regret trading my 8.0 Nick Cage copy for $25k to buy that one. 

The long-time owner who bought the book for $179k got I believe  around $1.3 million for the book. So the sales price could have been around $1.5 million. 

The same owner also owned the B&B #28 9.6 and sold it during the year. In that case, I believe the SP was $650,000. So the new owner probably lost about $500k on the two books. Per Heritage, the same guy owned all the keys in that Auction and was rich enough that he could have lost $10 million on them  and never felt a thing-must be nice LOL. I think in total he lost about a million. The prices were better than Heritage expected. 

BTW, Heritage only gets 10%, they calculate the amount due the seller as 108% of the hammer price. 

On 9/26/2023 at 2:16 PM, Chiparus said:

These are the other two WP books discussed:

Hi Guys, I just saw your discussion on the Showcase Western Penns that I am fortunate enough to now own. It took me about a year to negotiate their purchase in a private deal. The previous owner had owned them all for over a decade I believe-at least that Is what I was told. They were their current grades when I purchased them. I think they are gorgeous books, especially the #34, which is one of my favorite covers. 

The Slobodian book has been a topic of discussion for some time. I do believe the reported sale on GPA of over $200k is a fake and said so in my registry set. Doug had it listed for sale for years, but I do not believe he was ever the owner. At the time, he told me the guy who did own it  was kind of crazy and wanted $45k for the book. I think that would be a decent price today, it was not then. It has also been listed for sale at over $200k on CL and CC. 

I do question where the reported sale came from? I am not  sure what my book is worth, but I think it’s probably considerably less than $100k, which makes the listing of the 9.4 for over $200k just absurd. 

I do like the Showcase run quite a bit, but I am not sure we will ever try to complete it as money is limited and we collect too many titles. But if anyone comes across a nice Issue #39 in 9.0 or above, we (my son and I) would very much like to upgrade our #39 8.5. I have not seen one for sale since we started our Metal Men set. 

On 7/29/2022 at 12:25 PM, wytshus said:

https://www.cgccomics.com/news/article/10428/

 

Creating a new thread for discussion, and let you guys know what we have in store for next year's awards.

 

Congratulations to all!  

 

More to come....

I will admit I spend no time on these boards, but I have been a collector for 20 years or so and have been on the registry for over a decade. I was just browsing today and saw this topic and was frankly surprised with some of the content.

I honestly did not know there was even any effort to correlate registry points to monetary value, because for the most part on the Silver Age books I collect, it isn’t even close. I would say that, on average, the registry points have not at all kept up with the rising prices, especially over the last two years, except for a few keys. So, if that is really a goal, it’s not happening.

I never registered my books to win awards, but as an online inventory, which I could use to check what I have without going to the library shelves. I guess you could use some sort of Excel file to accomplish the same thing, but the registry has worked well for me. I personally think that, if you are going to have awards at all, they should be for collecting, not for having the money to buy one big book. Thus, I very much agree that there should be a sizable completion bonus. I also agree with bonuses for pedigrees and even page quality, as the market prices in both.

Another thing I don’t care for is how the awards have become (they may have always been, I don’t know) some kind of participation trophy. Without pointing out any particular winner, the winning sets most years are not the best in terms of completion or difficulty to assemble, some don’t even top the registry in that title. I think you should employ bonuses so that one or two books cannot score highest in a category, but I don’t think any set that is not at least best in that title should win a bigger award. It is really not hard to compete most sets if you will accept any grade, but finding every book in a longer set in high grade takes not just money, but considerable time and effort. 

I do understand not wanting to give the awards to the same sets every year, as based purely on merit, among registered sets, Colorado Comic’s Spidey Collection, which he sold on Heritage last September, should have won every year. Perhaps one improvement would be to add a listing of the top ten or top twenty or top 100 sets, depending on how ambitious you want to be, based on registry points. Such a competition, if you call it that, might motivate more big collectors to register their sets, as it would be a good marketing point if you ever turn around and sell your books. 

A perfect scoring system would probably require much more effort than the awards are worth, but as is, the problems with the scoring system are almost too numerous to name. There is simply no way I know of currently to verify whether the registry member actually has the books listed in their registry.  A person could go onto the Heritage database, grab the cert numbers of books not registered, which is time consuming, but not hard to do, register those books and top the registry. Now I cannot imagine why anyone would care enough to to do that, but as long as most books are not registered, which is certainly the case with respect to most early Silver Age Collections, we are not measuring the best collections, just those that someone took the time to input. 

There also are several sets still topping the registry where the owner has already sold all the books in question. Again, if the buyer does not register the books he buys, delisting the books by the seller takes some time and effort and there is zero motivation to do so. 

In short, the registry is a mess when viewed as a means of comparing various sets. And it gets back to the question, what exactly are we trying to measure here? I think that, if it’s a collecting award, you have to start by devaluing the keys, as those books just receive too many points, which is, of course, driven by the fact that the people who buy them are often investors and not collectors. Second, should the DC books receive more points than the relative values between DCs and Marvels? I understand that Marvels are far more popular and command higher prices, but finding High-grade DCs can be a Hell of a lot more challenging. Again, the question is what are we trying to measure? If it’s only how much money each collector has, well then publish their bank accounts rather than their registry points. 

It just seems like there should be more weight given to rarity in the census, if there are going to be awards at all. Let’s look at two iconic SA keys: AF #15 and Showcase #4. Now we all know that the AF #15 is a more coveted book, but it’s far from the rarer of the two. The Showcase #4 from 1956 has 552 registered copies in the census, 393 of which are unrestored. By contracts, the AF #15 from 1962 has 3,642 registered copies in the census, 2,349 of which are unrestored. So the Showcase #4 is roughly six times rarer than the AF #15. That rarity differential does go down as the grades go up, although it does still exist. There are 8 copies of Showcase #4 graded 9.0 or above (1 9.6, 2 9.4s, 2 9.2s and 3 9.0s) compared to 24 copies of AF #15 at those grades (4 9.6s, 6 9.4s, 3 9.2s and 11 9.0s). So the rarity index goes down to 3 to one. Presumably, the registry should reflect this by assigning more relative points to a high-grade AF versus a high-grade Showcase #4, does it? Not at all, the registry point system adopts no such refineries, the ratio of points assigned per grade stays constant between the two books. An AF #15 is worth 6.79 times what the same grade Showcase #4 is worth in terms of registry points. It’s a very crude system, as the points reflect neither value nor relative rarity. 

This discontinuity also exists between issues of the same title. Returning to the Flash Showcases, the #4 is actually the far most common Showcase Flash. There are roughly twice as many copies of Showcase  #4 in the census as there are of copies of Showcase #8, #13 and #14. A 9.2 copy of Showcase #4 is worth 81,000 registry points, even though there are 5  copies that are as good or better. By contrast, a 9.2 #14 is worth just 13,650 points, even though it is the best copy of that issue available. 

Another interesting statistic, the last time a Showcase #4 in 9.0 or above sold was about 8 years ago. In that time, there have been over a dozen sales of AF #15s in 9.0 or above. If the registry points are meant to track value, how do we have any idea what a high-grade Showcase #4 is even worth today? The problem, of course, is a common one between Marvels and DCs. High grade Marvels, at least of key issues, tend to be in the hands of investor/speculators, while the comparable DCs are far rarer and tend to be owned by collectors. Collectors don’t sale nearly as often. If you have all the money in the world, you can accumulate a high grade Marvel Collection from the internet and auction houses fairly rapidly, while accumulating a similar DC Collection may cost far less, but could involve much more work and the patience of Job.

As is, I don’t think the current registry point system measures anything of merit. I would prefer to see a better system or just junk it entirely. But implementing a better system requires first a determination of what you are trying to measure? I would argue for some form of point system that recognizes the difficulty of achieving a set in that grade. Ideally, it would reflect not just the grade of the books, but the rarity of such books, with bonuses for completion, page quality and pedigree. You might also consider a minimum number of books needed for a set to qualify for awards, maybe the lesser of half the books in a set or 100 books. It would also have to be frequently updated to reflect changes in the census. 

Perhaps the best answer would be some sort of scoring system based on percentages of what’s possible in the census multiplied by a level of difficulty, which could factor in cost. Again, it would probably entail more work than what it’s worth, but the current system reminds me of the old days of fantasy sports before desktop computers when we received a fax once a week with the league standings. It’s just so primitive, it really signifies nothing. 

If anything I said here offends anyone, I apologize, but I just don’t see any value in the current system. I do like the idea of having competitive sets, I would especially like a best set board on the site, which would direct a viewer immediately to the best sets out there. But as is, so few registry owners post scans or pics that I have pretty much  quit looking at other owner’s sets.

I do recognize that it would involve much more work to produce a more meaningful system. However, I like the idea of calculating a maximum number of points for each set and then scoring sets based on how close they are to real perfection, as reflected in the census. We don’t need to focus on scores for books that don’t currently exist. I think you also need some form of difficulty factor. Which reflects the overall number of books in the system for a title multiplied by some gauge of value, which presumably reflects the number of collectors chasing such books. You multiply the percentage of completion times the difficulty factor and you get a more meaningful score to compare sets that takes into account more than how much money someone has spent on a given book. You could then adopt bonuses for completion, pedigrees, page quality, etc…. You might also consider bonuses for pics and descriptions, although I guess there is a separate award for best presentation. 

You still have the problem of how few books are registered and collections that are still registered, but no longer exist. I have no idea how you get higher participation, I know many big collectors don’t register their books because they don’t want others to know what they need or lack. I guess you could have everyone who wants to be considered for the competition acknowledge that they still own the books in each set annually. Of course, they can always lie, but in most cases I think the sets our there that no longer exist are just a function of the owners not caring enough to remove them. 

Of well, I will end this treatise here. I would very much like to see a more meaningful registry point system for comparing collections, but I highly doubt we will ever see one, at least in the near future. 

On 11/30/2020 at 4:30 PM, Sweet Lou 14 said:

Anyone looking for a 9.8?  (Purple label, of course.)

https://www.comicconnect.com/item/900065

And no, it's not mine.

I was just browsing this topic and found this discussion. FWIW, I sent a scan of that book to Matt Nelson and he said it was an honest book and not one that would bother him. At any rate, it’s a beautiful book, if it were unrestored it’s probably at least a couple of million dollars in this market.
Personally, I think that the market probably punishes restored books too much. Restoration is accepted in all antique furniture and rugs, even cars and paintings. If I had to guess, it’s CGC’s work. IMHO, the day will probably come when such books trade for 20-25% of unrestored ones of the same grade. There are just so many new collectors and so few high-grade keys that the law of supply and demand will drive them up. But what do I know LOL. It is an interesting subject for sure. 

Chromium, you have a very good eye, your books present much better than their grades. 

Hi,

Old collector, new poster here. I think it’s evident that WP demand a premium, but here’s a debate I often have when deciding which book to keep. As most collectors know, Pacific Coast pedigrees are more often than not OW/W. When deciding which book to sell and which to keep, do you go with a PC pedigree with OW/W pages, or any major pedigree for that matter, or a non-pedigree WP copy?

I am very interested to hear others’ thoughts. I have tended to stick with the pedigree copy, but I continue to struggle with that one. 

Thanks

LOL, I wish. Have any of these $100k+ DD #1 9.6s been registered by anyone? I am guessing that DD #1 9.6 has become the comic equivalent of Game Stop, none of the buyers are comic collectors. it would be interesting to see whether the prices stay this high or it’s just a COVID bubble. 
 

All I know is that I am kicking myself that I did not just buy one at $40k last year instead of trying to get one down to $35k.